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FILE - In this Jan. 23, 2014, file photo, Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King of Iowa speaks in Des Moines. King questioned during a segment on MSNBC July 18, 2016, what groups of people have contributed more to civilization than whites. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File) (AP)

Opinion: 6 Republicans we'd like to see lose — ranked

There are certain Republican lawmakers whose defeats would be far sweeter to witness

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November 6, 2018 7:57PM (UTC)

While most polls project Democrats to gain a significant number of seats in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, not all victories are created equal.

What does this mean? It means that there are certain Republican lawmakers whose defeats would be far sweeter to witness than simply bringing down vulnerable moderate incumbents such as Rep. Barbara Comstock, R-Va. or Rep. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fl.

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In this article, we’ll rank the GOP officials who have done the most to earn a one-way ticket home from Washington, DC — and rate the chances that voters actually will toss them out.

Why is Cruz so loathed? For many people, he’s the kind of obnoxiously ambitious person whose greatest pleasure as a teenager was coming up with novel ways to obstruct Model UN resolutions. On top of that, as conservative Bret Stephens has written, he comes across as “a serpent covered in Vaseline.”

Unfortunately, it looks as though Cruz will cruise to reelection, as Real Clear Politics shows he has an average lead of 6.5 percentage points in polls.

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3. Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va.

The Tea Party favorite, who first burst onto the scene by defeating former Rep. Eric Cantor in a 2014 primary challenge, is facing a tough reelection fight from upstart Democratic candidate Abigail Spanberger.

“You think you’re having a hard time — I got $5 million worth of negative ads coming at me,” Brat told the inmate, who had just finished telling him about the struggles she’ll face once she’s released from jail. “How do you think I’m feeling? Nothing’s easy. For anybody.”

Hunter, who was the second congressman to endorse Trump’s candidacy, was indicted on corruption charges this past summer, with charges that included the misuse of $250,000 worth of campaign funds and then falsifying campaign finance records.

In response to the indictment, Hunter gave an utterly disastrous interview to Fox News in which he blamed his wife for any alleged improper uses of campaign cash, and also complained that “it’s difficult to live in a place like San Francisco or San Diego or New York or DC” on a congressional salary.

That may change this year, however, now that Walker’s signature deal to bring a Foxconn manufacturing plant to Wisconsin has turned into a massive disaster for the state.

As the New Yorker reported recently, Foxconn “recently changed the type of factory it plans to build, downsizing to a highly automated plant” that will employ just 3,000 people — a far cry from the 13,000 manufacturing jobs it originally promised to create.

What’s more, Foxconn estimates that 90 percent of the workers will be “knowledge workers” with college degrees, while the actual manufacturing work will be performed by robots.

All this comes despite taxpayer subsidies to Foxconn that totaled a whopping $4.5 billion, the largest ever given by a state to a foreign corporation.